“How hard to build it?”
“Simple. The hardest part is the battery, and that'll fit in a liquor bottle, like I said. We'll make it a brand that you usually find in a duty-free store — I have a guy checking that — one with a ceramic bottle 'stead of a glass one. Like an expensive bottle of Chivas, maybe. The Japanese like their scotch.”
“Detection?” Ryan asked.
Clark grinned like a teenager who'd just snookered a teacher. “We build the system exclusively from Japanese components, and we place a receiver tuned to the right freqs in the aircraft. He'll be traveling with the usual mob of newsies. I'll set a receiver in the waste bin of one of the downstairs heads. If the op gets burned, they'll think it was one of their own. it'll even look like a journalist did it.”
Ryan nodded. “Nice touch, John.”
“I thought you'd like that. When the bird lands, we have a guy recover the bottle. We'll fix it — I mean, we'll see to it that you can't get the cork out. Superglue, maybe.”
“Getting aboard m Mexico City?”
“I have Ding looking at that. Time he got a taste of planning operations, and this is the soft side. My Spanish is good enough to fool a Mexican national”
“Back to the bugging equipment We won't be reading this in real-time?”
“No way.” Clark shook his head. “What'll come across will be garbled, but we'll use high-speed tape machines to record, then we can wash it through the 'puters downstairs to get clean copy. It's an additional operational safeguard. The guys in the chase birds won't know what they're listening to, and only the drivers need to know who they're shadowing… maybe not even that, as a matter of fact I have to check on that.”
“How long to produce clean copy?”
“Have to do it at this end… say a couple of hours. That's what the S&.T guys say, anyway. You know the real beauty of this?”
“Tell me ”
“Airplanes are about the last place you can't bug Our S&T guys have been playing with it for a long time What made the breakthrough came from the Navy — very black project. Nobody knows we can do this. The computer codes are very complex Lots of people are playing with it, but the actual breakthrough is on the theoretical side of the math. Came from a guy at NSA. I repeat, Sir John, nobody knows this is possible. Their security guys will be asleep. If they find the bug, they'll think it's an amateur attempt to do something. The receiver I put aboard won't actually recover anything usable to anyone but us—”
“And we'll have a guy recover that also, to back up the aerial transmissions.”
“That's right. So we have double-redundancy — or triple, I never have figured what the right terminology is. Three separate channels for the information, one in the plane, and two being beamed out from it.”
Ryan raised his coffee mug in salute. “Okay, now that the technical side looks possible, I want an operational feasibility evaluation.”
“You got it, Jack. Goddamn! It's good to be a real spy again. With all due respect, watching out for your ass does not test my abilities all that much.”
“I love you, too, John.” Ryan laughed. It was his first in too long a time. If they could pull this one off, maybe that Elliot bitch would get off his back for once. Maybe the President would understand that field operations with real live field officers were still useful. It would be a small victory.
25
RESOLUTION
“So, what's the story on the things?” the Second Officer asked, looking down at the cargo deck.
“Supposed to be the roof beams for a temple. Small one, I guess,” the First Officer noted. “How much more will these seas build…?”
“I wish we could slow down, Pete.”
“I've talked to him twice about it. Captain says he has a schedule to meet.”
“Tell that to the fuckin' ocean.”
“Haven't tried that. Who do you call?”
The Second Officer, who had the watch, snorted. The First Officer — the ship's second in command — was on the bridge to keep an eye on things. That was actually the Captain's job, but the ship's Master was asleep in his bed.
MV George McReady was pounding through thirty-foot waves, trying to maintain twenty knots, but failing, despite full cruising power on her engines. The sky was overcast, with occasional breaks in the clouds for the full moon to peek through. The storm was actually breaking up, but the wind was holding steady at sixty knots and the seas were still increasing somewhat. It was a typical North Pacific storm, both officers had already decided. Nothing about it made any sense. The air temperature was a balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and the flying spray was freezing to ice that impacted the bridge windows like birdshot in duck season. The only good news was that the seas were right on the bow. George M was a freighter, not a cruise liner, and lacked antiroll stabilizers. In fact, the ride wasn't bad at all. The superstructure was set on the after portion of the ship, and that damped out most of the pitching motion associated with heavy seas. It also had the effect of reducing the officers' awareness of events at the forward end of the ship, a fact further accentuated by the reduced visibility from flying spray.
The ride also had a few interesting characteristics. When the bow plowed into an especially high wave, the ship slowed down. But the size of the ship meant that the bow slowed quicker than the stern, and as the deceleration forces fought to reduce the ship's speed, the hull rebelled by shuddering. In fact, the hull actually bent a few inches, something difficult to believe until it was seen.
“I served on a carrier once. They flex more than a foot in the middle. Once we were—”
“Look dead ahead, sir!” the helmsman called.
“Oh shit!” the Second Officer shouted. “Rogue wave!”
Suddenly there it was, a fifty footer just a hundred yards from the George M's blunt bow. The event was not unexpected. Two waves would meet and add their heights for a few moments, then diverge… The bow rose on the medium-size crest, then dropped before the onrushing green wall.
“Here we go!”
There wasn't time for the bow to climb over this one. The green water simply stepped over the bow as though it had never been there and kept rolling aft the five hundred feet to the superstructure. Both officers watched in detached fascination. There was no real danger to the ship — at least, they both told themselves, no immediate danger. The solid green mass came past the heavy cargo-handling masts and equipment, advancing at a speed of thirty miles per hour. The ship was already shuddering again, the bow having hit the lower portion of the wave, slowing the ship. In fact, the bow was still under water, since this wave was far broader than it was high, but the top portion was about to hit a white-painted steel cliff that was perpendicular to its axis of advance.
“Brace!” the Second Officer told the helmsman.
The crest of the wave didn't quite make the level of the bridge, but it did hit the windows of the senior officers' cabins. Instantly, there was a white vertical curtain of spray that blotted out the entire world. The single second it lasted seemed to stretch into a minute, then it cleared, and the ship's deck was exactly where it was supposed to be, though covered with seawater that was struggling to drain out the scuppers. George M took a 15-degree roll, then settled back down.
“Drop speed to sixteen knots, my authority,” the First Officer said.
“Aye,” the helmsman acknowledged.
“We're not going to break this ship while I'm on the bridge,” the senior officer announced.
“Makes sense to me, Pete.” The Second Officer was on his way to the trouble board, looking for an indicator light for flooding or other problems. The board was clear. The ship was designed to handle seas far worse than this, but safety at sea demanded vigilance. “Okay here, Pete.”